IMPERIAL BEACH 
When SANDAG said more sand for Imperial Beach, residents didn’t expect that they would be getting more water, too — in their condominium buildings.

As part of its 2012 Regional Beach Sand Project, SANDAG spent four weeks in September replenishing more than 4,200 feet of beach south of the pier in I.B. with 450,000 cubic yards of sand dredged from Mission Bay. The agency finished the project in October, and for the last two months, says resident John Ireland, his condo garage has been flooding whenever the moon is full and the tide is high.

Ireland and his wife, Elizabeth, live in a beach-side condo on Seacoast Drive, across the street from the Tijuana Estuary.

“We’ve had quite a time here,” he said. “Our underground garage got flooded with 8 to 12 inches of water, and no one could get to their cars for two or three days.”

The problem isn’t the new sand, he said, but the way it was banked. He suspects that in an effort to preserve the expensive resource and keep it from washing back to sea, SANDAG sloped the sand away from the surf and toward the residences. Now when waves crash over the embankment, instead of returning to the ocean, the water runs down the gentle grade, pooling up and filtering through the sand below into the lower levels of the buildings nearby.

“It’s a very good design for not losing sand, but it’s very bad for us residents,” Ireland said.

But SANDAG staff said the beach was not created with a high bank near the tide. The sand was level when it was installed, they wrote in an email to U-T San Diego, and high tides and wave action have since moved the new sand, creating that higher “lip” along the western edge of the beach.

“Flooding in the Seacoast area is due to multiple causes, including higher than usual tides, proximity to the ocean and the estuary, rain runoff, low levels of the condominium garages, and possibly the new sand from the sand replenishment project,” they wrote. “The added sand acts as a filter and slows down the drainage of the water.”

Assistant City Manager Greg Wade said it appears that only buildings with below-ground parking structures are experiencing flooding.

After the first flooding in November, Ireland and some other residents approached SANDAG about the problem, and the agency sent out a crew with bulldozers to dig a trench down the beach designed to retain the water. The trench only exacerbated the problem the next month, Ireland said, serving as an even deeper reservoir to collect the water before it seeped into the basements of neighboring buildings.

“I don’t think (SANDAG officials) anticipated exactly what has been going on south Seacoast Drive, but sometimes you just don’t know what Mother Nature is going to do first,” said Mayor Jim Janney.

SANDAG staff said that was indeed the case, and they are investigating ways to mitigate the flooding, but warned that there may be no absolute solution.

“Even if additional action is taken, experts consulted by SANDAG caution that some flooding may continue to happen when there are high tides,” they wrote in the email. The agency will not have a cost estimate for dealing with the flooding until it settles on a plan of action.

The sand replenishment project was intended to help residents who had barely any barrier left between their condos and the surf because of erosion, staff added. The new sand acts as a buffer to protect both public and private property from storm surges that could cause potentially more severe flooding.

Wade said that in that respect, the sand is serving its purpose.

“This time of year with the storm and tide events we’ve had, we would likely have seen an inundation of our street ends,” he said, which would have required costly cleanup of sand, seaweed and rocks. “The primary objective is to provide shoreline protection, which it’s doing.”

He expects that the flooding will subside as the tides change later in the year, but can’t say for certain when that might be.

Janney said he is confident that SANDAG has done its best and will continue to address the issue until the drainage is no longer flooding residents’ buildings.